I'd be interested in hearing thoughts about this as well... I honestly never thought this would even be released, I figured there's be some legal action which would prevent them from ever seeing the light of day.

It’s basically a windows 10 computer with the Dreamcade front end. Setting it up was all through windows and annoying to me. I actually needed a mouse and Keyboard before I can even do anything it. Controllers do connect as said, but in my experience, I synced an Xbox one controller to it, then had to resync it to the xbox one to use it on that. Then I had to resync it again on the replay, and put the inputs in again!
The interface is pretty lame IMO. If you have a ton of roms, there’s no way to quickly scroll through them. That’s a big pain. All the roms are being run through mame. All my roms ran like shit. Mario 2 that I downloaded through the archive was washed out and choppy. My own copy that runs fine elsewhere ran twice the speed on mame. The downloading roms from the archive is really as easy as they say it is though. I downloaded contra. Choppy, screen tearing, flickering, disappearing sprites. Mame won’t save my input controls, keeps listing start as “none”, like it did that for every new game I tried, not even leaving the emulator ...

Worst part.... no factory reset. on the forums they said they are "ironing that out" Wtf

there's a lot of tech savvy/extremely nice people on the boards though. the one member suggested installing Launchbox and retroarch, for thats what he did. I told him I'm not good at this kind of stuff and he said he would guide me through it. like I said, really nice, but it kind of feels like I bought a more expensive raspberry Pi at this point, and the whole Idea of this was to avoid having to set up stuff like that. I just wanted "plug and play"

oh and the HDMI cable they sent wouldn't be picked up through my HDMI splitter so I had to use my own cable.

there is also an "emulation wizard" that supposedly lets you add an emulator to have the dreamcade launch it's games with that instead. That would be absolutely perfect, except even the really tech savvy members of the board said they can't really figure it out and its a pain in the ass. I think if that gets patched I'll appreciate it more. till then I'll just hold on to it I think and wait it out.

Yeah that’s pretty much it. Well I guess the big draw in is being able to easily download the roms or even stream games, but like I said, the mame emulation has been lousy for me. I’ll wait till more people get their hands one it. Not many people have it, I just got lucky being the 10% of people who got it early.

I received mine last week. This thing is a piece of gosa. I am an avid retro arcade enthusiast and I have built my own bartop system based on retropie and its works great. Everyone who sees it has to try it out. It even has a Turbo Twist spinner for Tempest. I am also going to pick up one of those ArcadeOneUp 3/4 replica cabinets later this year. I have quite a bit of experience setting up emulators like MAME, PCSX2, etc. and FEs like Launch Box.

The reason I backed this project was that Dreamarcades (creator of DreamCade Replay) has some of the most amazing looking high end, high price, multi-arcade cabinets I have ever seen! I almost bought one but ended up making my own small bartop instead.

I was hoping this little "console" would be an easy way to get some MAME and NES/SNES games connected to my TV. But this thing is 100% not a console. Its a very cheap Win10 PC with what looks like Dreamarcades FE. But its poorly installed, controller support was very bad out of the box, SNES games would not exit requiring a power cycle, the FE crashes, FE features like favorites and adding/removing games don't work. The system for finding new games does not even work with the Windows controller directly. They install this "virtual mouse" software that does not even work with Bluetooth Xinput devices (i.e. new Xbox One controller).

I have experienced mostly just headaches getting it set up.

On the one-up side, when it works (MAME works well) its shows it has true potential. But I think they made some really poor choices and created some pretty buggy and clunky FE. Its not a "console" in any way. Unless you consider Win10 a console OS. And, the thing that really ticks me off is that I have posted a number of major issues on the forums and I get no fixes, nothing. They can provide updates and one did fix Xbox One controller setup but there are many, many more major issues that make this thing just unusable.

I am pretty harsh I know. But they really sold this thing as a plug and play console and I don't know about that. Many people could not even get it working because they had to run through Win10 initialization and could not get it working at all.

So, consider yourself warned. If you want to tinker with a cheap PC, I would just buy a cheap PC and install a better MAME/FE. I get the feeling mine will just be gathering dust and hoping for updates that actually fix it.

I finally received mine. It crashed during setup and now it won't even turn on. Their "forum support" has offered zero solutions. So far I'd recommend that people stay far away due to the serious lack of customer service alone.

By providing links to other sites, CheapAssGamer.com does not guarantee, approve or endorse the information or products available at these sites, nor does a link indicate any association with or endorsement by the linked site to CheapAssGamer.com. CheapAssGamer.com is owned and operated by CAG Productions, LLC.